Spaceship Damage

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The explosion is like every gram of the impactor and the thing it hits exploding as if it were some multiple of its' mass in TNT. 20x at 7 miles per second.

A fragmenting projectile might produce a conical pattern. An aggressively vaporizing projectile not so much. Also, higher energy in the energetic plasma mostly means more thermal radiation and not higher particle speed.

It's pretty easy to get KE hits that look like baby nukes. What you're going to see is points of white light.

How aggressively is it vaporizing? If it's passing through the target at 10 miles per second and exploding outward at 10 miles per second, that's going to be very much a cone. Superficially it seems that the explosion speed should be lower than the initial impact speed, though maybe not.

If the projectile loses a lot of its relative velocity in the collision, that'll give you a nice roughly sphere-ish 'boom' at the point of impact. If it doesn't, it'll give you an explosion that's moving at interplanetary velocities relative to the target as it expands... This won't make the weapon blink go away, it'll just mean that even more of the energy of it doesn't wind up deposited into the target ship.